After 9 months of lurking here, going betta crazy and way too many water changes I finalllllllly got a ten gallon tank and all the stuff to divide it. Plus I got an order of wonderful hornwort & duckweed (or is it frogbit?) in the mail today from a great person from the plantedtank.net forum and they gave us a filter as well!!!
I am now thinking shrimp method may be easiest, although I am severely scarred from reading about JKFish's planaria outbreak with the shrimp..
I'll post some pictures and keep everyone updated! And have questions!
Right now here's the plants in their critter keepers:

Okay here's the fam settling in with their new floating plants...
The first is my original betta Clampy playing futbol with his ping pong ball..he's so cute!!
Then there's Hannaford my orange SBD rescue looking handsome!
Then Pantheon- a CT in action-he dances through the water-
Then there's an arial of three of my critter keepers with Clampy, Hannaford and Phantom (they are 6 gallons and then 1.5 gallons-I also have 2 3gallon criiteer keepers-and I can't wait to replace these all with a cycled tank or two...:D :D which I am going to start setting up now!)
The last two are Snowbear

as for lighting I got a florescent grow strip lamp from walmart for ten$ today and I am going to use that to keep the plants growing in the critter keepers by placing it above them while I am cycling the new ten gallon. I hope that works okay, the bettas are freaked out by how bright it is actually right now...

I divided the tank today and am waiting for the silicon to cure, I also added the gravel and the granite I've been collecting as well as some plastic plants (when it is cycled I will replace these with the live plants). I will be using the shrimp cycling method!!! So excited can hardly wait!